The Vatican has put its considerable weight behind a very clear call for dealing sensibly and sensitively to climate change. The call has come from a summit organised and hosted by two of its own institutions, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Both have as visiting or contributing academicians a panoply of academic heft – amongst them are Veerabhadran Ramanathan, professor of field atmospheric sciences, Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, professor of astronomy, Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar (MGK) Menon, professor of physics, Chintamani N R Rao, professor of chemical science, and Govind Swarup, professor of astrophysics.
The summit was held on 28 April 2015 at the Vatican and was titled ‘Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development’. The meeting was intended, said the Vatican’s press office, to help strengthen “the global consensus” on the issue of climate change. The 28 April meeting is part of the Vatican’s increasing efforts to influence the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which meets in Paris in December 2015 with the goal of getting countries to establish legally-binding protocols to protect the climate.
“Global climate change adversely affects every aspect of our civilisation and thus should be a matter of serious concern across all world religions,” said the Vatican statement on the meeting. “Their effect on the poor is even more severe. We wish to elevate the importance of the moral dimensions of protecting the environment in advance of the Papal encyclical and to build a global movement to deal with climate change and sustainable development throughout 2015 and beyond.”
Pope Francis is reported to have prepared a major encyclical – or moral guide for Catholics – which when released (probably in July) will stress the imperative of addressing human-caused global warming. In November 2013 Francis rocked the Catholic world with his apostolic exhortation in which he held forth convincingly on the economy of exclusion, the new idolatry of money, a financial system which rules rather than serves and the inequality which spawns violence.
This meeting ended with a joint statement on the moral and religious imperative of dealing with climate change in the context of sustainable development, and it is possible that the substantive points of the ‘Moral Dimensions’ meeting will find their way into the Pope’s encyclical on climate change and sustainable development (as it is likely to be popularly known as, shorn of the florid Latin).
With an opening address by Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, and with a statement by Jeffrey Sachs (economist and director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network), the meeting included a panel on ‘Evidence on social exclusion and climate science’ with Peter Raven, Partha Dasgupta, John Schellnhuber, Martin Rees, V Ramanathan, Y.T. Lee and Paul Crutzen.
The point of view of the Vatican, and presumably of Pope Francis, was provided by Cardinal Peter K A Turkson (who in October 2014 said to the WTO that trade is “unbalanced and unjust when it adds to the landscape of social exclusion”). Explaining the subject Turkson said that “the current economic-developmental model is out of balance” and emphasised that “we must move away from this mode of behaviour, and instead become more protective”. Turkson said that we need innovative and sustainable technological and economic solutions, and “shift away from an unthinking infatuation with GDP and a single-minded zeal for accumulation”.
Pope Francis is turning a just idea of development and climate change into recurring themes of his papacy. He talked about these subjects during his inaugural mass in 2013, and told a crowd in Rome last May that mistreating the environment is a sin. Last year, the Vatican also held a five-day summit on sustainability, calling together microbiologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts to discuss ways to address climate change. [Photo: Photographic Service L’Osservatore Romano]
– Rahul Goswami